A Platonov translator responds

Russians often say that Platonov is untranslatable.  I, naturally, do not believe this to be the case.  I would even say that Platonov’s genius is so overwhelming that it is possible for an Anglophone reader to sense it immediately, after reading only a few sentences in translation.  Here, for example, is a passage from Takyr (1934), a short story set in Central Asia: “Zarrin-Tadzh sat on one of the plane tree’s roots (…) and noticed that stones were growing high on the trunk.  During its spring floods the river must have flung mountain stones at the very heart of the plane, but the tree had consumed these vast stones into its body, encircled them with patient bark, made them something it could live with, endured them into its own self, and gone on growing further, meekly lifting up as it grew taller what should have destroyed it.”

I am sure Platonov did not intend it as such, but this plane tree now seems like a perfect image for Platonov himself—for his tenacity as a writer and for the vitality of his work.  Our aim as translators is to reproduce both the life-force of the tree (the energy of Platonov’s thoughts, images and rhythms) and the heaviness of the stones (the horrors that the first half of the twentieth century flung at Platonov and his contemporaries).

Some of our Platonov translations have been published more than once, and in different versions.  The best introduction to Platonov is Soul and Other Stories (NYRB Classics, 2007).  We—i.e. my wife and I, together with the American Slavicist Olga Meerson—have also recently retranslated Platonov’s most famous work: The Foundation Pit (NYRB Classics, 2009).  Our next volume from NYRB Classics, Happy Moscow and Other Stories, will be published in late 2010 or early 2011.  The Portable Platonov (Moscow: Glas, 1999) includes, amongst other work, one of Platonov’s finest plays, The Fourteen Little Red Huts, and three extracts from the long novel Chevengur.